That premise, which is spelled out in the otherwise excellent liner notes—as artful a combination of marketing savvy and musical scholarship as I’ve encountered—is that while much has been made of Jewish interest in black music, the converse has remained a little-known trade secret.

There is, in turn, just one thing wrong with this premise: It simply isn’t true.

Yes, much has been made of the many Jews who have played a role in black music and culture. For recent examples, look no further than the films Cadillac Records and Who Do You Love; and David Lehman’s A Fine Romance: Jewish Songwriters, American Songs, one of several books the Society recommends for further reading.

But should the performance of Jewish-themed material by black musicians really come as such a surprise to anyone who has been paying attention for the past 100 years?

“To me,” says Lehman, who teaches in the graduate writing program at the New School, “this is not news.” (When we spoke by phone, Lehman had not yet seen the disc.)

That Black Sabbath was inspired by the random discovery of an old vinyl recording of Johnny Mathis singing “Kol Nidre” suggests that the collectors behind the Society may suffer from Christopher Columbus syndrome: Having tripped over a continent, they assumed that they were the first to have discovered it. By that logic, every 13-year-old boy on earth could claim to have “discovered” the miracle of onanism.

The evidence for black investment in music that bears some relation to Jews and Judaism is all around us and has been for some time–even longer, I would guess, than all of those early 20th-century recordings of black baritones belting out Negro spirituals. And is it any wonder? Five thousand years of exile, oppression, and slavery virtually guaranteed that Jews would serve as allegorical stand-ins for African-Americans. After all, it wasn’t so long ago that “Go Down Moses” made a conveniently coded song of protest.

If this long-standing musical relationship seems at all surprising from a contemporary vantage point, that’s “only because we’ve been conditioned to imagine that Jews and blacks are in conflict with one another politically and culturally,” says Lehman—conditioning that has much to do with the rift that opened between the two groups toward the end of the civil rights era, a black-Jewish love-in the likes of which we’ll probably never see again.

One can’t deny the distance that now separates black Americans from American Jews, or the emphasis that contemporary observers tend to place on the appropriation (read: theft) of black culture by Jews and other white folk. But it seems silly to suggest, as if by extension, that any part of their long, two-way history of cultural exchange remains undiscovered country.

It’s also silly to read too much into the musical tea leaves. Is it really significant that Jimmy Scott covered the theme to Exodus in 1969–the same year that the Temptations unleashed their groovy “Fiddler on the Roof Medley”—when both Exodus and Fiddler were such huge hits that few didn’t try them on for size? Or that Mathis gave forth with “Kol Nidre” in 1958, when he already had available for study Perry Como’s 1953 version? Perry Como, ladies and gentlemen.

Josh Kun, who wrote those otherwise excellent liner notes, attributes much of this to the sense of solidarity that many blacks felt with Jews after the birth of Israel, when they saw reflected in the successful push for a Jewish homeland their own yearning for freedom. And he may have a point, at least when it comes to a tune like Lena Horne’s “Now!,” a sock-it-to-’em protest song from 1963 set to the tune of “Hava Nagila.”

But much of the music included in the compilation was simply in the air at the time–a time that was both closer to the golden era of Jewish jive exemplified by Slim Gaillard’s “Dunkin’ Bagel,” from 1945, and Cab Calloway’s “Utt Da Zay,” from 1939; and to the golden era of Jewish folk song, which owed as much to the larger folk revival of the 1950s as it did to Israeli independence. Popular entertainers draw their material from popular culture, and these Jewish-themed tunes qualified as such at the time.

This might all sound like pointy-headed quibbling, especially given how entertaining the music on Black Sabbath is (the album has justly made it onto the Billboard chart) and how poor our collective memory tends to be. Lehman contends that any reminder of the long history of positive collaboration between blacks and Jews is both welcome and salutary, and I won’t argue with him. Nor will I deny that Billie Holiday’s home recording of “My Yiddishe Momme,” from 1956—a genuine find that’s almost painful to hear, given how battle-scarred Holiday’s voice was then—“makes the point in a way that’s impossible to miss.”

But this isn’t just any old compilation CD. It’s a compilation CD with a message and a mission. And both seem needlessly muddled.

In contrast, there was nothing at all muddled about the presentation that the Bronx-born, Budapest-based fiddler and food blogger Bob Cohen recently gave on his 30 years of research into Jewish and Gypsy music in Romania.

Speaking at the Center for Jewish History as part of the New York World Festival: Music Around the Black Sea, Cohen traced the complex musical connections between the Roma and the Jews–connections that really do qualify as “secret,” if only because many of the people who once played traditional Central European Jewish and Gypsy music are now dead and the audience for such sounds has largely disappeared.

Any effort to unearth those connections, and the history of positive cultural collaboration between the Roma and the Jews–especially at a time when many European countries seem intent on subjecting the Roma to the same treatment that African-Americans received only two or three generations ago–seems both welcome and salutary, as well.

And, um, we’ve got it. Have a listen:

Tracklist below the jump.

Ez-Learn Piano- Irving Fields
Exotic on the Speaker- Soulico feat. Rye Rye
Holiday Mambo- Machito & His Afro-Cubans
Ye Ye What Will Be- Ha’Shmenim Ve’ha’Razim
Dunkin Bagel- Slim Gaillard
Adir Adirim- Balkan Beat Box (Nickodemus Remix)
Kale Kale- Avram Grobard
Swanee- Aretha Franklin
Im Ze Los Mat’im Lach- Tahles (Assaf Oren Remix)
Sha! Shtil!- Gucci Vump (L-Vis 1990 Remix)
P’Sach Lanu Sha’ar- The Sway Machinery
Malkat Haclipper- Fishi Hagodol & Piloni
Middle Eastern Freak- Soulico
Hava Nagilah- Musicmakers Ltd.
Bei Mir Bist Du Schoen- Tony Martinez Quintent with Dorothy Loudon
Freylekhs Fun Der Khupe- Solomon & Socalled
Halevai- Moishe Oysher & The Barry Sisters
Where Can I Go?-Marlena Shaw
She’s A Woman- The Churchills
Pobrecito Salomon- Pablo Beltran Ruiz
Cha Cha No. 29- Irving Fields (MIS remix)
Nadine- Fool’s Gold (Memory Tapes remix)
Ragtime Cowboy Joe- The Barry Sisters

Conceptually, I tried to do a mix of old, archival, vintage recordings, and mixed that in with some contemporary stuff that has been remixed, or is more fitting to a dance floor vibe. The Barry Sisters, Machito & his Afro-Cubans, mixing up to bands like Soulico, from Israel, as well as a kind of crazy, eight-minute, classic eighties house version of “Hava Negilah”. Plus a number of cuts from leading African-American artists that are on Black Sabbath, the compilation we’re releasing this July, which has traditional Jewish and Israeli tracks by African-American artists.

“Oh plus,” he added, “some really great Israeli psychedelic rock!” Trippy.

Below: Slim Gaillard’s “Dunkin Bagel,” a track from the mix.

Anyone who’s seen Dirty Dancing is familiar with the relationship between Jews and Latin music, at least among the Catskills set. Of course in the early 1960s, when that movie takes place, the “fad” was on its way out among the youth, as evidenced by heroic dance instructor Johnny mumbling that his sniveling boss “wouldn’t know a new idea if it hit him in the Pachenga.” Now, again, though, the hip kids at the Idelsohn Society for Musical Preservation are bringing back the simpatico combination with their reissue of 1961’s Mazel Tov, Mis Amigos on their label Reboot Stereophonic. The album was marketed as a recording by the fictitiously named Juan Calle and His Latin Lantzmen, which offered Yiddish standards, including “Bei Mir Bist Du Shein” and “Papirossen,” in a Latin dance style. In a twist on the usual tendencies of cultural appropriation, the band was actually made up of Latin and African American jazz stars, including Charlie Palmieri and Doc Cheatham, pretending to be Jews.

To celebrate the release, there will be a one night only performance of the album by Arturo O’Farrill’s Afro-Cuban Sextet next Sunday, August 23, in New York City. The band will be accompanied by guest stars including Jeremiah Lockwood, the Antibalas horns, and Irving Fields, who was one of the pioneers of the Jewish-Latin fusion sound.

“This is a quintessentially perfect New York Latin jazz and Jewish music project,” says O’Farrill. As a kid in Manhattan, “my best friends were Arthur Meyer and Scott Mendel, I grew up going to Brighton Beach to visit their relatives,” he says. “It’s just natural for me to have grown up in an environment where I knew the word schlep.” The Latino element was even more of a no-brainer—he was born in Mexico and his father was Chico O’Farrill, a renowned musician and founder of the Afro-Latin Jazz Orchestra, which Arturo has led since 1999 and which was in residence at Jazz at Lincoln Center from 2002-2007. The relationship between Jewish and Latin music, he says, has a “symbiosis that you can trace directly, historically. In addition, there’s a lot of empathy [between the two cultures] on the issue of alienation.”

When O’Farrill first listened to Mazel Tov, “it seemed like something I’d heard my whole life. When we were teenagers, we used to jam in jazz and funk, and sometimes attach a freilach melody.” But he has a distinctly lighthearted attitude toward what he calls this “musical interchange”: “There was nothing serious about the ‘preservation of society’ in it.”

He has a unique appreciation for the fact that the album’s musical fusion was partly catalyzed by a profit motive. “It’s a spirit of camaraderie and musical experimentation, not without its fair share of obvious marketing desire,” he said with great cheer. “But I think that’s cool, and very intensely funny, that someone at Riverside Records thought, ‘Let’s make a Latin Jewish album. Think how many people will buy it!’”

Although he is thrilled with the work the Idelsohn Society does, says O’Farrill, “The philosophy behind so much institutionalization is backwards: let’s preserve. That wasn’t the idea behind the creation of this album. It was: let’s progress a tradition.”

Arturo O’Farrill

“When I was in Jazz at Lincoln center, and this may be the reason I’m not there anymore, I wasn’t interested in being a ‘museum band,’ replicating something people did with the spirit of newness when they first did it,” he says. Instead he prefers to ask, “Why did it seem so great in the beginning? Because people took chances.” O’Farrill’s instincts are more at home in a series like Lincoln Center Out of Doors, of which Sunday’s performance will be a part, and for whom, he says, “their guiding light is that rare fleeting magic that takes place when you do something wild.”

O’Farrill doesn’t think there’s anything particularly challenging about the music on Mazel Tov, but he does believe it takes a certain background to be able to make it work: “You have to find people who’ve played their fair share of mambo dances and their fair share of bar mitzvahs.” He says his band fits the bill. He has a particularly star-studded crossover experience on his resume. “I played a birthday party for the president of Movado U.S.—myself, Wynton Marsalis, and Paquito D’Rivera.” The watch honcho’s request from the jazz greats? “Hava Nagila.”

On the album, each track is listed as a pairing between a traditional Yiddish song and a particular Latin musical style, including mambo, cha-cha, and, yes, a pachanga (“Beltz, Mein Shtetele Beltz”). According to O’Farrill, these are relatively proscribed forms, and the renditions on Mazel Tov don’t veer far from the basics. “The depth does not come from the depth of the style,” he says, “it comes from the synchronicity.” Neither are the Yiddish songs particularly profound or meaningfully lyrically, which appeals to O’Farrill’s populist attitude. “Its not the profundity of rabbinical, liturgical singing, it’s from the more accessible end. In that sense it’s beautiful. [They] left the profundity to come from the interchange.” He intends to do the same at the show, at which, he says, “all kinds of madcap mayhem will hopefully take place.”